My favorite weekly newsrag has produced yet another flight of fancy, this time called "Is the Party Over?" by one Michael Grunwald, a "reasonable" left-wing journalist.  Grunwald is, of course, referring to the currently down (but not out) Republican Party, and he's speculating that traditional conservatism will doom the party to extinction in this nation of liberals.  Talk about flights of fancy!

And how do I know Grunwald is a left-winger?  It's easy - his article is loaded with "reasonable" sounding assumptions that are actually opinions masquerading as journalism.  For example, in one paragraph he characterizes the traditional GOP position of strong national defense as meaning "strong support for torture," by which I suppose he must be referring to the successful interrogation techniques employed during the War on Terror at such places as Guantanamo Bay.  However, since none of these techniques involved any kind of physical pain, much less death, truly reasonable people understand that these techniques were nothing like torture, particularly when compared with sawing a captive's head off with a dull knife.

Grunwald also offers up the opinion that "support for 'gay' [homosexual] rights is soaring" presented as fact.  In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth, as even traditional-marriage supporter Barack Obama understands.  His article is filled with such suppositions disguised as facts, but his biggest flight of fancy comes when he predicts the ultimate success of liberal policies.

Grunwald makes this prediction in a backhanded way by sneering at conservatives who insist "that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment, and tax cuts actually boost revenues - even though the vast majority of historians, scientists, and economists disagree."  This statement is purely - purely - fantasy masquerading as fact.  Let's take the first statement, that the New Deal made the Depression worse. Forget historians.  Their work is limited to reviewing the writings and statements of historical figures and using them to paint a picture of the past.  They do little if any analysis, so what they say about the New Deal isn't relevant to this discussion.  As for economists, thanks to such recent work of Amity Schlaes in The Forgotten Man and Vedder and Gallaway in Out of Work, the majority have now come to realize that the New Deal did in fact make the Depression work.  But as long ago as 1939, Robert Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury Secretary, understood that this was true, saying, "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot."  These are the facts, Mr. Grunwald.

As for carbon emissions being bad for the environment, the fact is that there is far from any unanimity among climate scientists on this issue, and among the scientists who do think that man-made carbon dioxide is causing climate change (which would have to be warming, according to their theory) are included at least some who, as recently as a couple of decades ago, were predicting a disastrous "nuclear winter" if we didn't slow down our burning of fossil fuels.  Now that it seems as if the earth might actually be warming, they've generated mathematical models to demonstrate that there is a correlation between human-produced carbon dioxide and this warming trend.  They then leap to extend this correlation into causality, for which there is little justification.  So this is hardly a settled issue, in spite of what Mike Grunwald thinks.  These are the facts, Mr. Grunwald.

Finally, tax cuts do, at least at some levels, generate increased tax revenues.  Even John Kennedy understood this, because he so stated as he signed a tax reduction bill during his presidency.  And he was right, because tax revenues are documented to have gone up following the passage of his bill.  Ditto the Reagan tax cut in 1982, and not only did Reagan's cut increase tax revenues, it ushered in an almost three decade long era of sustained prosperity.  Think about this for just a minute.  If a tax rate is 100%, it will clearly generate no revenues, because no one will work to earn any money at that rate.  Therefore, reducing it to, say, 90%, will generate at least some revenues because at least some people will have an incentive to work (or, in our economy, stop paying accountants and lawyers to find tax shelters), even it they only get to keep 10% of their income.  It's easy to see that reducing it further will continue to give more and more people the incentive to work, which will continue to increase tax revenues as long as the increase in the number of people earning income continues to offset the reduction in the marginal tax rate.  At some point, of course, there will be so many people working that further reductions will begin to generate lower total revenues, but the evidence is that this rate is fairly low in our economy.  For example, when George W. Bush reduced the top marginal rate from 39% to 35%, total tax revenues increased as the economy took off.  Any economist worth his salt understands what I've just said, and that's a fact, Mike Grunwald.

Time is our ally in this fight.  The Mike Grunwalds of the world can spout their nonsense at times like this because the American people are a little panicky and confused by the events of the last year, but in spite of Grunwald's assumption that liberals will ultimately be successful, history - real history - demonstrates that their policies will fail.  For example, history shows us that appeasement fails, that the activities of mere humans have little impact on God's climate, and that overspending in a restrictive business climate causes the economy to fail.  If we stay true to our principles instead of panicking ourselves, we will come roaring back, and it will be sooner rather than later, and that's a fact, Mike Grunwald.